Houston stops helping Louisiana fill beds in its for-profit prisons

HOUSTON -- For five years, the mighty Harris County Jail in Houston and the mundane LaSalle Correctional Center, 238 miles away in Louisiana, carried on a long-distance relationship built on mutual dependency. The Texas jail, the third-largest in the United States after those in Chicago and Los Angeles, was bursting at the seams. It had the federal Justice Department looking over its shoulder, and it was under enormous pressure to reduce overcrowding.

In 2007, the county's voters had, by a narrow margin, rejected construction of a new jail. It desperately needed places to send more than a thousand prisoners it could no longer legally and safely accommodate.

The 750-bed LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla, 40 miles north of Alexandria, sits in the middle of nowhere looking for all the world like a warehouse. It is one of 12 correctional centers in Louisiana and Texas run by LaSalle Corrections, a Louisiana-based for-profit prison chain that always needs bodies to fill its beds and can provide them at a very competitive price -- pickup and delivery included.

So it was that every Sunday the LaSalle bus with bars on the windows would drive five hours from Olla to Houston to swap prisoners whose time was up for a fresh batch with time to serve.

"We didn't have any problems," said LaSalle Warden Jeff Windham, a former chief deputy of the LaSalle Parish Sheriff's Office. "Everything went fine."

Until the end of last year, when it all abruptly ended. The relationship didn't end because of anything LaSalle did wrong. It ended because of something Harris County did right.

The jail population in Harris County had dropped 31 percent in three years, and Sheriff Adrian Garcia, elected in 2008, announced he wouldn't be sending prisoners to Louisiana anymore, not to Olla and not to its other partner, an even further-flung private prison, the West Carroll Detention Center some seven hours from Houston in Epps.

Between them, Olla and Epps -- the latter one of a half-dozen detention centers run by the Emerald Prison Enterprises, another Louisiana-based outfit with facilities in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico as well as Louisiana -- had held as many as 1,200 of their inmates at a time, according to Harris County. But by the end of 2011, the average daily population of the Harris County Jail, which had once climbed above 12,000, had fallen below its capacity of 9,434 to 8,573 inmates.

For Olla and Epps, the breakup was tough. "We'll recoup, but it hit us pretty hard when they left," Windham said.

But for Harris County, the outcome confirmed that innovative efforts to reduce its population and curb recidivism were paying off. "It's been more successful than we anticipated," Garcia said. And it showed what can happen when a jail's bottom line is to reduce occupancy, not maintain it.

Crisis intervention

While the lockups in Olla and Epps are private facilities -- paying annual sponsorship fees of $120,000 to LaSalle Parish and as much as $200,000 to the town of Epps -- Louisiana's local prisons operate on the same business model, making money off each bed they fill: The more inmates and the less they spend on each of them the better.

It is no coincidence that Louisiana has both the highest incarceration rate and the lowest per-capita spending on inmates in the nation.

But in Harris County -- its 4.1 million population nearly equals Louisiana's -- the Sheriff's Office consumes a third of the budget in a county reliant on diminishing property-tax receipts. Spending $30 million, as it had the past two years, to stash prisoners in Louisiana and elsewhere in Texas, no matter how cheap the per diem, was untenable.

The biggest single factor in the drop in the Harris County Jail population was a decision not by Garcia, a Democrat, but by District Attorney Pay Lykos, a Republican, who also was elected in 2008.

Beginning in January 2010, the Harris County district attorney's office stopped bringing felony charges against those arrested with crack pipes or other drug paraphernalia that contained trace amounts -- less than one-hundredth of a gram -- of drug residue, not even enough to allow the defense to do its own independent testing. That alone meant that on any given day, there were 400 fewer inmates in the jail.

Meanwhile, with roughly a quarter of the jail population exhibiting some kind of mental-health problem requiring psychotropic medication, the county created a crisis-intervention team to respond to police calls when mental illness seemed a likely part of the mix and treatment might be more appropriate than jail.

Garcia doubled the number of chaplains in the jail from 100 to 200, mostly volunteers, and instituted a new earned early-release program for nonviolent offenders actively participating in an educational or vocational program.

"What's ground breaking about this is that we're doing it in a jail setting as opposed to a prison," said Wayne Heintze, director of chaplaincy services for the jail, where the average stay is only a month and no one is serving longer than a year. "These are short-time folks. However, the recidivism is there. They do come back. If you look at the raw data, about 80 percent of the folks we have come in, over the course of the next three years, will come back. Now some studies have shown that if you plug them into a program, plug them into a church, plug them into a job, into education -- whatever it takes to plug them back into society -- that number drops you to about 15 percent. There's a huge percent for us to capture there."

'It opened my eyes'

Jesus Gonzalez was "captured" while awaiting trial on what he considered bogus drug charges. "I was going to the library and I seen some officers handing out fliers: 'You interested in taking a course?' There were several choices," Gonzalez said.

The one on auto repair caught his eye. "I used to help my uncle; I have a little knowledge of that. Let me get into that. I was waiting to go on trial, fighting my case, but I just enrolled in the class, trying to learn as much as I could while I was there.

"It opened my eyes to a lot of new materials, different kinds of paints, how to refurbish headlights, lots of things," he said of the course taught by Gustavo Gomez, an instructor from Houston Community College.

Ultimately, nearing a year locked up, Gonzalez relented and pleaded out in exchange for time served. After his release, he was able to use his training to get work at the Port of Houston, touching up Volkswagens that arrive at the port before they are sent off to dealerships around the country.

Gonzalez said that before his time in jail, "I had veered off, not doing much of nothing positive. I was a functioning addict, doing odd jobs here and there and playing around with alcohol, drugs, dealing with the devil. I got in trouble. I've been running from the Lord."

But now, he said, pushing 50 with a grown daughter and grandchildren, "I'm putting the foolish things behind me. I've grown up mentally. I want to see my grandkids grow up, and I want to take them fishing. It's time to make up for the things I did not do."

Gonzalez thanks God, and he thanks Gomez.

Back in Olla, Warden Windham said, "We're just trying to build back up with DOC (Louisiana Department of Corrections) inmates." Jefferson Parish, he said, can always be counted on to provide a steady supply.

Louisiana Incarcerated: Intro VideoLouisiana has more citizens in prison than anywhere else in the world. A New Orleans Times-Picayune team of reporters led by Cindy Chang along with photographer Scott Threlkeld investigates why. Here is a video preview of this Times-Picayune special Report.